Three-hourly rainfall time series (from TRMM 3B42)

Contact Mark Mulligan . Click here to access the data (requires Google Earth version 4+). How to use (video) (requires Adobe flash ). If your version of Google Earth show errors when downloading the zip files, please right mouse button click the links to the data and choose save link. This will then open the link in your web browser.

This database is compiled from the 3B42 product of the Tropical Rainfall Monitoring Mission (TRMM).The data represent three-hourly rainfall estimates for 0.25 degree cells for all land areas from 50 degrees North to 50 degrees South supplied in annual timeseries files for each grid cell from 1998-2006. The database contains 1.5 million files.

12/5/2012: Apparent file corruption for some tiles: A few of these files seem to have been double zipped so that when you extract the .txt and open the .txt file with an editor like notepad you will see unintelligible binary code. This is the workaround: (a) download the .gz file (b) use winzip etc to extract the .txt inside (c) rename the .txt to .txt.gz (e) open this in winzip etc and extract the .txt file (f) the file will now be readable in notepad etc.

To use, zoom in to see the data tiles. Zoom further into particular tiles to see the grid of points representing the centres of the 0.25 degree TRMM 3B42 cells and their bounding boxes. Click on any one of the placemarks to open a balloon containing some details of the associated time-series and a link to download the data by year in g-zipped ASCII timeseries. The timseries have columns for year, month, day of month, julian day, hour, rainfall (mm/hr) and estimated global rainfall error (mm/hr).